Untapped Link Building Tactics

By Sef
Posted On
Sunday, May 17, 2015
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In search engine optimization (SEO), links are widely known as a must-have signal for websites, not only to increase website visibility or to increase your website organic rankings, but also to expand their audience reach in their industry. Surely, the main goal we should have in mind when we build link is to drive referral traffic to our website and increase the ability of our website to perform in organic search.

In link building, you can’t just decide to do whatever link building tactic works for your competitors. If they do guest blogging, would it make sense if you do the same? If you want to see long term results and keep your website away from algorithmic filter and manual actions, then you should think of something better.

Something that will make your website standout from the rest. But how will you do it? How can you use your links for traffic generation and potential ranking improvement of your website?

Read on as this article might give you some insights. I’ve created a list of tactics that you might be able to help you out.

Conversation link building

Who said conversation is not a good form of link building? Well it’s actually a better one - if you just do it right. This type of link building don’t require you to be a guru or an expert in the topic, you just need to know exactly what you are contributing to the table. Otherwise, you will rather be ignored than be noticed by the community which is not a good thing right?

In fact, this tactic can really help you drive targeted traffic to your website over time so you definitely have to contribute valuable insights and not just leave your link and expect traffic. As SEOs, one of our responsibilities are to build relevant link and drive relevant traffic to a website, which make this tactic perfect.

Finding the targets:

To spot potential link opportunities for this tactic, you always need to use the “question phrases” such as how. Typically, you will need to answer whatever their questions they have.

To start with, you can use Quora.com to find easy to answer questions related to your industry.

site:quora.com “earn money online”

Filter the results in a month or weeks to only see fresh questions

Look for question phrases

Do these steps to make things work:

Research carefully the topic before joining in to the conversation for better understanding of what the topic is about.

Write about your research and make it an evergreen content so you can continuously drive traffic to your website.

Share what you have in your content to the thread but don’t give all what you’ve got so they will have to click through your link to see the whole picture information.

Bonus tip:

Quora shows related questions to your topic so you’ll have a list of pages to visit within the website.

Entity Link Building

We’ve all been informed that brand mention is a good form of link building. However, brand name is not the only entity that we use online - it could be names or places which correlate to the brand/company name.

While no-link mentions are good, websites are better off with links pointing to them rather than plain text. In fact, DejanSEO did a study in 2012 if plain text can help a website increase ranking performance of the site. But confirmed there was none.

The best thing in this tactic is.. It can help you find websites who have mentioned you but not linking to you, and monitor your reputation online whether for your brand or for people in your company.

Just take a look at the professional page of Dan Petrovic, Founder of Dejan SEO. His page according to Mozbbar has a page authority of 55 over 100 and earned entity mention from various domains such as News.com.au and ABC.net.au

In order for this tactic to work, you need to have a dedicated page on your website which talks about important people in your company such as your CEO or key team players. By including relevant information such as interview exposure, guest authored articles or media exposure links, you can make the page link worthy and high quality.

How to do this:

You’ll need to create a profile page of your CEO, Manager or Key Team Players for professional information.

Curate all articles, media exposures, interviews of your CEO/Manager being featured on other websites.

Find entity mention of people in your company on related websites, news sites, blogs etc.

Contact people who have mentioned their names without linking to your website.

Note: This tactic is not available for start up websites.

Participate in Local, National or International Events

Having hard to replicate links pointing to your website can be your advantage. Knowing that this type of link can’t just be created through broken link building, guest blogging or resource page linking because this is editorially given by a webmaster.

Also, this type of editorially given links don’t feel like to get overused anytime soon so this is probably your kind of links if you want to stay away from unnatural links.

Take a look at online marketing conferences such as Morcon (Mastering Online Conference) which happens once a year. Morcon is a Philippine-based conference wherein like minded marketers in the Philippines come together and share marketing ideas, experience and knowledge to the community.

One remarkable speaker you can get to meet in Morcon is Jason Acidre, a well-known SEO consultant recognized by international SEO community which is definitely an honor to meet in person.

At the moment, Morcon does not have a website (that I’m aware of) to show a bit of information about the speakers. However, since Morcon is full of smart online marketers, it’s has all the rights to get featured on a link building blog such as Digitalphilipines.net.

Another perfect example is the recent event happened in San Jose, CA last March 2015. Glen Dimaandal - CEO of GDI Online Marketing was qualified enough to get accepted as a speaker at the event, giving him a chance to link his online marketing firm.

Normally, each speaker is required to provide a short description of themselves and most of the time it comes with brand name with a link to their website. Example

The good thing about this tactic is you can expand your brand awareness which can drive new visitors to your site.

Tips to get this done:

Find organizations in your industry that have frequent conferences locally or nationally. You can use Facebook Group or Meetup.com to easily find your targets.

Reach out to group administrators and request if you can be one of the speakers on the next event.

Select highly interesting topic that you have a lot of knowledge about so you can be very confident to know every ups and downs of it.

Radio Interviews

Do you want media exposure or media links? Have you been looking around HARO for news links? You can probably get those links in a quite simple way. Interviews have been around for some time now and is very popular for online marketers and bloggers for exposure and link opportunity.

However, what I noticed is most of the time, we only tap bloggers to request interviews and rarely to tap other interview opportunities such as radio interviews. In fact, radio interviews can expand your brand audience reach and can attract targeted traffic to your website - not to mention the link you can get from them when you get featured in an interview.

A perfect example on this is the interview of Benj Ariola, VP for SEO of Internet Marketing Inc. They had a two consecutive exclusive interview with Benj Ariola about Google Mobile and User Generated Content.

Although the interview page itself didn’t include a link to IMI’s website, it has earned quality link on websites like finance.yahoo.com. Was it worth it? Hell yeah!

If you have not tapped radio interviews yet, here’s what you’ll get:

Media link/s to your website - Giving you a quality link which can give you an edge in the competition in terms of ranking.

Free media exposure of your brand in local market - giving you an opportunity to attract your local target audience.

Giving your website trust and authority value by being cited on media site in your target location which sends positive signal to search engines.

How to get Radio Interviews?

Find radio programs in your industry who interview companies, bloggers, marketers or entrepreneurs.

Listen to their previous interviews to know who sort of topics interest them.

Send them an email containing your interview request.

Let them know how interested you are to be featured to their program.

Sponsor Venue for Events

Do you wish to earn links to your website or do you just find it hard to earn links? You can probably earn links by doing a unique approach. Normally, every industry has conferences happen once or twice a year conducted by industry leaders to meet other experts or newbies in their industry.

Surely, they have all the budget they need to occupy a venue for their event. However, if you have extra space in your area where you can allow experts in your industry to use for their events, would not that be great?

That’s definitely something you don’t want to let pass, Here’s why:

You can build strong relationship with experts in your industry which can make outreach easier for you.

Earning links whenever you have upcoming events in your industry which you are sponsoring won’t be difficult.

Increasing your social followers won’t probably a huge problem.

Where to find these experts?

Meetup or Facebook group is probably the best choice you can use. Just look for up coming events happening in your local area.

Contact the meet up organisers that you would like to sponsor a venue for their next event.

If all goes well, you can request the event speakers to write an article about the next event on their blog with links.

Things to keep in mind when you do link building:

Keep relevancy all times - This is something that link builders should not overlooked or ignored. If you want your links to stand out and remain valuable to your website, creating relevant links is definitely crucial.

Diversify your anchor text profile - Of course, everyone in the SEO industry is aware that we can no longer exhaust partial and exact keyword match anchor text as anchor text because it only sends negative signals to Google and can put a website at risk.

Use your brand name - Of course for none advertorial purposes. If you want good looking links, instead of using your target keyword as anchor text, why not just your brand name? This gives your brand a

Avoid spam triggering words - As much as possible, do not use “cheap, affordable, buy, free +keyword etc” use in your anchor text as part of your keyword

Use only quality sites - If you want your links to work for you in terms of traffic generation or can help in your ranking improvement, use only relevant sites in your industry that are highly visited and have good authority and recognition in your industry.

Final Words

Everyone knows that in link building space, quantity don’t matter if your inbound links are crappy and violating webmaster guidelines. You need quality and relevant links pointing to your website. But keep in mind that you can’t be obsessed with links, don’t focus on them. Build links slowly but with quality for better ranking performance of your website in organic search.